Week Ending 13th March 2015

Jacob Millin, our Head of Drama, will be leaving us at the end of the year as he and his wife make their move to Norfolk. We wish them well! This week we have been busy appointing Jacob’s successor and we are delighted to announce that we have appointed Suzy Marston who is currently Director of the Performance School at Impington Village College. Suzy comes with an outstanding track record and is known for staging amazing productions, using her own acting experience to instil incredibly high standards in her performers. She is very excited about joining us and clearly has a vision for how she will shape drama at Chesterton.

The winners of ‘Chesterton’s Got Talent’, “Solla Sollew”, will be touring four feeder primary schools with their performance of ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ on the afternoon of Friday 13 March and all day on Thursday 19 March . The students are: Josh Bailey; Danny Evetts; Rosie Green; Ben Rowland; Sophia Stickley and Eve Werdmuller. Invitations for the group to perform have been flooding in, as word has spread. We may start charging commission!

We continue to work on developing student voice in school and we welcome student comments about how the school can develop. Already in place are the house councils, where student representatives from each tutor group discuss their ideas. House Council representatives then bring a summary of requests to one of our senior leadership meetings every half-term. We have found that we have been able to act upon all the comments brought forward so far. In order to develop the process even further, and following from student comments, we are also going to have a drop-in on the last Monday of every half-term where students can make an appointment to meet with members of the senior team if they have any ideas or suggestions they would like to share.

Twelve girls from Year 9 and 10 attended the “We Day” at Wembley on Thursday. They heard from lots of motivational speakers and social activists including Martin Sheen, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yusuf, Princess Beatrice and Holly Branson. These students will be part of a “We Act” project in the summer term, when they have the opportunity to plan and take their own social action locally and globally.

Next week we have Dr Sam Aaron, from Cambridge University Computer Science Department, visiting the school to demonstrate “Sonic Pi”. As the creator of the programmable synthesizer, he has travelled all over the world demonstrating its potential. We will be starting our own Sonic Pi club, run by Year 10’s, and will be introducing Sonic Pi programming into the Year 9 curriculum in the Summer term.

Twenty-three French students and their teachers will be visiting Chesterton and sampling the sights and museums of Cambridge. They are so excited they can’t sleep! We will be welcoming them warmly and flying the French flag all week.

Preparations are in full flow this week for our West Road concert. As ever we are all looking forward to the outstanding musical performances we will witness. Please do come along and support.

For the first time next week we are opening our doors to some of the senior citizens in our local community. Now that we manage our own catering we are able to extend an invitation for members of our local community to come and join us for a regular lunch date every month. We’ve liaised with Nick Moir, vicar at St Andrews Church, and he has helped us to invite a group of local senior citizens who will come and eat with us. If you are aware of any other community groups we could link with and who would benefit from a similar offer please do contact us.

A reminder that on March 24th at 7pm we will be holding a Parent Forum focused on our potential build. Please do put the date in your diary.

All of KS3 and some KS4 students are just over halfway through their Readathon. Each student has set themselves a reading challenge to complete in just three weeks. Students are being sponsored for their challenge with the money going to four fantastic children’s charities: CLIC Sargent, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity, ReadWell and Together for Short Lives. Students have set themselves varied and interesting challenges including: reading texts in other languages, reading bedtime stories to younger siblings and reading a set of classics. Some students have taken the Chesterton challenge to read: a text with -ing in the title, a text with a colour in the title, a text with a family relation in the title, a text with water in the title, a text with a city in the title and a text with an animal in the title. We are enjoying reading students’ posts on Edmodo as they chart their Readathon journey and make suggestions to each other on what to read next.

Year 9 all participated in Belt Up on Monday afternoon. The theatre-in-education event presented a road safety scenario which highlighted the important role our students could play in being safe passengers in a car. Students had lots of ideas about improving the behaviour of the passengers in the car to make the journey much safer.